Alien Help
MashpitSquared
Texas, USA Join Date: 2014-01-13 Member: 193053Members
Texas, USA Join Date: 2014-01-13 Member: 193053Members
I've been playing NS2 on and off for a while now. Great game, although it's a real shame that so little people play it.
Anyways, I had a problem that I kept running into when I play the game.
I have a real easy (and fun!) time playing 'rines: shoot Skulks, yell at comm to get shotguns when Lerks show up, spam mines, establish frontlines and slowly creep our way to victory, yadda yadda yadda.
The problem arises when I play Aliens. Of course, I'm not too shabby on my skulking (Although my aim snap/twitch when tracking pogojumping marines need some improvement), and even the worst of pubbers can manage a kill or two as an Onos, but I think I need help on how to play the "middle" lifeforms, namely the Gorge, Lerk, and Fade.
First off, the Gorge. When on marines, they appear to be annoying-as-hell bullet sponges that don't like go down, and will heal up and come back to bilebomb your obs in 10 seconds. When I play Gorge, however, clog placement that doesn't trap higher lifeforms is a pain to make, Hydras seem useless, tunnels get no khamm support nor player support, and I die surprisingly fast to w0a0 marines. I would like tips on increasing survivability as a Gorge, without relying too much on pub Skulks.
Second, the Lerk. When on marines, Lerks are twitchy-as-hell initiators who tend to be wall paint once shotguns are out, but has a tendency to turn around you until you run your mouse off your mousepad. Of course, when I go Lerk, every single 'rine in the area suddenly seems to be gifted with perfect aim. I would like help with juking bullets and minimizing exposed hitbox space as a Lerk, as well as a guide on how much punishment you can exactly endure (which situations you can safely engage in).
Last, the Fade. Amazing players will stomp with over 40 kills and no deaths, and tends to get away scot-free even after I greet them with a ~200 damage shotgun shot on their first swipe. When I play Fade, however, I'm terrible at energy management, meaning that I get up close to the enemy rines... and then not have any energy to swipe, leaving two very happy marines and one very dead Fade. I would like help on juking more efficiently, and better energy management.
For all the lifeforms, it would be neat if I can be given an "optimal" set of upgrades, or at least when you would use each upgrade for what situation.
And one last thing: are there any viable, "predetermined" strats as a Khamm, like how marines have the (pub standard) PG rush, or upgrades rush, or (rarely) jetpack hive rush? And what are strats/counters you can employ against such marine tactics?
Anyways, I had a problem that I kept running into when I play the game.
I have a real easy (and fun!) time playing 'rines: shoot Skulks, yell at comm to get shotguns when Lerks show up, spam mines, establish frontlines and slowly creep our way to victory, yadda yadda yadda.
The problem arises when I play Aliens. Of course, I'm not too shabby on my skulking (Although my aim snap/twitch when tracking pogojumping marines need some improvement), and even the worst of pubbers can manage a kill or two as an Onos, but I think I need help on how to play the "middle" lifeforms, namely the Gorge, Lerk, and Fade.
First off, the Gorge. When on marines, they appear to be annoying-as-hell bullet sponges that don't like go down, and will heal up and come back to bilebomb your obs in 10 seconds. When I play Gorge, however, clog placement that doesn't trap higher lifeforms is a pain to make, Hydras seem useless, tunnels get no khamm support nor player support, and I die surprisingly fast to w0a0 marines. I would like tips on increasing survivability as a Gorge, without relying too much on pub Skulks.
Second, the Lerk. When on marines, Lerks are twitchy-as-hell initiators who tend to be wall paint once shotguns are out, but has a tendency to turn around you until you run your mouse off your mousepad. Of course, when I go Lerk, every single 'rine in the area suddenly seems to be gifted with perfect aim. I would like help with juking bullets and minimizing exposed hitbox space as a Lerk, as well as a guide on how much punishment you can exactly endure (which situations you can safely engage in).
Last, the Fade. Amazing players will stomp with over 40 kills and no deaths, and tends to get away scot-free even after I greet them with a ~200 damage shotgun shot on their first swipe. When I play Fade, however, I'm terrible at energy management, meaning that I get up close to the enemy rines... and then not have any energy to swipe, leaving two very happy marines and one very dead Fade. I would like help on juking more efficiently, and better energy management.
For all the lifeforms, it would be neat if I can be given an "optimal" set of upgrades, or at least when you would use each upgrade for what situation.
And one last thing: are there any viable, "predetermined" strats as a Khamm, like how marines have the (pub standard) PG rush, or upgrades rush, or (rarely) jetpack hive rush? And what are strats/counters you can employ against such marine tactics?
Comments
Hydra's are not useless, just not overpowered. Hydras will either distract a marine/s so he/they have will shoot them down before engaging. If the marine/s do not shoot them down they cause chip damage that makes the marine easier to kill.
This is an example of good clog placement:
Tunnels getting no khamm or team support is a team skill issue. Gorge tunnel's are important and should be defended. If multiple tunnels are placed, the khamm probably only has enough res to support 1 maybe 2 tunnels. The team support is another issue that is harder to resolved. I know that defending them with even a skilled team can be difficult after the recent nerf.
Increasing survivability as a gorge without skulks is a tough request. A gorge's role is not to be the main attacker. He should have skulks and or other lifeforms that he heals and defends. There are a few subtle skills that are lifeform universal that make a good gorge: when to engage and when to disengage a situation, aim (gorge spit aim specifically), and map knowledge that allow you to know where to duck and weave from. A gorge though is primarily a support role meant to build and heal. If you want to battle gorge I will leave this video here.
To finish off my comments on gorge, I will leave you with this entertaining example of an impressive battle gorge in action which is not normal gorge play. It is a lot of fun to play like this though. Pay attention to how he has incredible aim and usually has other lifeforms being a distraction.
Second, the Lerk. When on marines, twitchy-as-hell initiators who tend to be wall paint once shotguns are out, but has a tendency to turn around you until you run your mouse off your mousepad. Of course, when I go Lerk, every single 'rine in the area suddenly seems to be gifted with perfect aim. I would like help with juking bullets and minimizing exposed hitbox space as a Lerk, as well as a guide on how much punishment you can exactly endure (which situations you can safely engage in)/
Last, the Fade. Amazing players will stomp with over 40 kills and no deaths, and tends to get away scot-free even after I greet them with a ~200 damage shotgun shot on their first swipe. When I play Fade, however, I'm terrible at energy management, meaning that I get up close to the enemy rines... and then not have any energy to swipe, leaving two very happy marines and one very dead Fade. I would like help on juking more efficiently, and better energy management.
The same skills that make a good lerk, make a good fade. There are lifeform universal that make a good alien: when to engage and when to disengage a situation, aim, and map knowledge that allow you to know where to duck and weave. With either one it is usually the best to disengage as soon as you lose your armor. If the marine is looking at you, it is probably not a good idea to engage unless you are 100% confident. If you die, then next time you won't be 100% confident. You can try to engage, but leave if you have to much damage as soon as you poke your head out. How to juke bullets is really hard to explain. Video might help you out more, but a lot of this really just has to be learned from play I think. I would link some video's but I don't know any good ones at this time.
***Players that are better than me, please correct me as needed but I do feel I wrote good stuff.
- Blink in
- 1-2 swipes/hits
- Blink out
- Check your energy and HP
- Wait a short time till enery regained (metabolize helps much here)
- do above again and again
Dont be greedy.
If you miss too many swipes, blink out before more marines arive.
Dont perma blink.
Use a short blink to gain speed and jump to hold it (with this mechanic you save energy)
If you lose speed use a short blink again.
You can combine above said with blink up in the air.
Advantage:
You can regain energy, confuse your enemy while you stay in fight.
Watch your escape routes.
Good marines reading your attack pattern and they will going to trap you while you are low on hp trying to escape.
Try to waste marines' bullets before going in for bites. Even if you're 'sneaking' up behind marines, you're super loud and you do NOT want them to have a full clip if you need to escape. Spam space wildly, holding down CTRL so you don't stick to walls, and move the mouse around violently and wildly. No, more than that. MORE. You can make yourself very hard to hit, especially by pub marines. Works well in a taller room.
Do not 'W lerk.' This is when you fly straight. Don't do it, unless you're definitely clear from incoming marines and your target is reloading. Even then, be super careful if you just W lerk into him, because he might take the pistol out and kill you in the 10 bullets in its clip.
Go for maximum bite accuracy. At least at first in the engagement, get some bites in accurately, even if it's a bit slow (because you're flapping slightly away/around the marine and not necessarily getting 2 consecutive bites in). Once the armour is gone, 3 consecutive bites will kill any marine even through medspam, so make sure that armour is down. This is where harassing first with spikes is most useful, btw.
ALWAYS know your escape route. Any half decent marine will see the engagement on their map and try to cut off your way out, assuming you will have taken some damage from your target. If you need to get out of a situation, you may need to spazz out with the mouse again to waste marines' ammo before making good your escape.
Don't be afraid to spike, dodge out, maybe go around the marines another way and harass from a different angle. The less time you're in one place, the less chance you have of getting flanked, just don't be too obvious about it, and be EXTREMELY careful whenever you go behind the front line.
Power is in numbers. A 2 lerk combo is so much more powerful than the sum of its parts, and still more for 3 lerks working together. Later in the game, you'll need to support fades more by chipping armour and not going in for bites so much (because shotguns).
It *should* be possible in a pub not to lose your lerk if you don't want to. Most lerks I lose in pubs are because I'm actively trying to be more aggressive just to train myself to land some more bites, but when I'm playing conservatively, it's generally pretty easy not to lose an early game lerk (maybe late game if the marines have teched up - that's the hardest lerking of all where 1 grenade spammed can leave you on basically no health, or jetpacks are actively trying to trap and chase you down). I'm not an amazing lerk by any stretch of the imagination, but it is my lifeform in comp play and I've learned a lot about lerk play in the last 18 months or so (and have plenty more to learn about it).
Don't go close range vs shotguns.
Don't stand still in the air or even sit anywere vs rifles.
Don't fly around corners on the inner side if sgs are up.
Watch your map all the time and try to anticipate where marines might be trying to trap or ambush you.
Another importand thing a lot of players don't get right: Learn your role in the team.
In a normal game until lerks are up the marines are normally in an advantage. So the skulks job is mainly to defend the 1-2 rts they dropped in the beginning (to get the lerks up asap). This means they have to scout (or if noone is scouting and no parasites are up anticipate) where the marines will be pushing. In that case the skulks need to be quick to group up and ambush the marines before they are inside the rt-room. This normally should take a maximum of 1 more skulk then incoming marines. If it fails and the marines are in a good position already you probably have to group up to clear that pressure or trade the rt to achive something else like killing pressure on the other side or bite a lot of marine rts. Agains a good organized marine team with good routeblocking it can be very hard to bypass marines early and bite res, but some skulks should always do this to force the marines to defend and recap their rts instead of pushing your harvesters.
When lerks are up one of their importand jobs is to defend rts (for example by spiking marines and not letting them go into the rt-room and in a good position) while skulks are the active resbiters. Once you have cleared a wave of marine pressure on one side of the map as a good lerk you have to know if you have time to help your skulks to bite rts on that side (again for example spiking one or two incoming marines can delay them so the skulks can finish oif the rt) or if there is marine pressure incoming to your rts on the other side of the map (where you should already be in a good psoition to spike them before they enter the room). I think normally lerks should also not stay to close to the marine base. Just imagine shotguns are up. What's the point of killing a shotgunner outside his base and risking to lose your lerk? Maybe you can kill him but get one full shot. Then you are low on health and need to retreat. In the worst case you get trapped on your way back and in the best case you have to fly all the way back to your hive/healing station/gorge and lose a lot of time where you can't fight and do anything usefull for your team. And the shotgun is probably gonna be picked up by a respawning marine anyway. It is much more usefull to kill some shotgunners at your natural rt. That way you won't get trapped while retreating you can heal at your hive pretty fast and the marines are probably gonna lose the shotguns.
If all this works out and the game is not already won or lost fades should be available. If you are still alive with your lerk by then (and you should be if you were not too agressive or got trapped) the lerks can start to help resbiting (if you have many fades and lerks you almost have to because there are almost no skulks doing it) and in this stage of the game you should almost have res to relerk if you die and your teams needs a lerk.
This is basically what I do when I am lerking and as Roo said in a pub (and an even game) it is pretty hard to die as a lerk if you don't want to.
Defensive stuff - Get clog pillars 2 clogs high in the open areas marines are likely to stand in, in the area you're trying to defend. Use clogs to set up LOS-blocking obstacles you and your team can use for cover during fights. If you make walls in one place, marines will just jump over the wall, run to cover from the hydras and kill you, then your hydras, then everything else.
Marines will kill you in 1 clip if they land every bullet (not hard, fatty
A few pillars near some hydras will allow you to weave in and out of the pillars while healing yourself and the hydras. The hydras will take care of the marines armour and once the armour is gone, provided the marine isnt getting medspammed you can take them down in like 4 spits? Spitting against marines with armour takes a billion spits to kill though so dont do that.
Dont build tunnels exit-first unless the situation absolutely calls for it. It really irks me when gorges do this, only to lose the exit seconds later.
At work so just braindumping a little bit here
Lower speed also makes it easier to aim, which is another plus.
To all the people responding to my original post: Thanks for all the help! I'll try playing Lerk less aggressively, and remember not to get greedy as a Fade. I guess Gorges will always need heavy team support, though.
Anyways. Would anyone like to answer what set of upgrades are "optimal" for each lifeform (Skulk and Onos included), and what "basic" strategies are available to a khammander?
I recommend asking gisp. That guy is a single-gorge war machine.
IronHorse must always want to flash his lerk. :P
if you're a noob carapace is always your best bet. regen can be good on lerks ( @IronHorse regen wasn't buffed in vanilla yet, was it? ). also remember that as a skulk you can switch your upgrades at any time for free! so go carapace, take some damage, pull back, switch to regen. once you're back at full hp you can switch back to cara even. if you've got shift upgrades always go celerity. the only valid reason to go adrenaline is you're a lerk umbra botting (it's also probably a better choice for gorges, but i don't care about gorges). shade hive, on lifeforms you should ALWAYS go aura. on skulk you go phantom ( @IronHorse vanilla is still phantom, isn't it? ).
this is the simplest way to command aliens:
when the game starts, cyst to both natural nodes. now drop a drifter in base. upgrade to crag hive. wait to see where engagements happen. whichever side ends up feeling safer (more marines died on that side, no marines went that side, etc.) drop the harvester at that natural. move your drifter there to build it. from this point on your goal is to cyst agressively and take harvesters. whenever your team clears a room, if it is adjacent to a room you already hold, you need to cyst into it. so, if you dropped reactor, and your team clears data, and is moving down toward pipe, cyst data immediately. then you just kinda judge how safe it is before you drop a harvester. always scout with a drifter at least before dropping it. blind drops are bad. drop two shells as soon as you can afford them. use pve sparingly. if one of your harvesters takes some damage but doesn't die, drop a crag a ways back and walk it up to the harvester when it's done. put whips just inside doorways so the marine has to push all the way into the room and risk getting hit by the whip in order to shoot it. get up to a third shell whenever you can. start upgrading biomass whenever you can. your first lifeform upgrade should be metabolize. if you're holding at least three harvesters when fades come up you should start trying to secure a hive location. if you've got a gorge building the hive drop him a shift. upgrade this to a shift hive when it's done. now you want to go for charge, bile bomb, and umbra however you see fit. the way that you absolutely end a game as aliens is getting to three hives and contamination / echo whip rush. these can be difficult to execute well, but they end games. requires some practice. once you can do all of this decently well, you'll start thinking to yourself "hey, i never seem to have much to do as alien commander." this is when you need to start microing. drifter abilities! generally speaking you should always have about two drifters. more and you're wasting money, less and you're not effective enough. drifter abilities can turn the tide in early engagements and are great for keeping lifeforms alive. other things to work on are using pve effectively, knowing when to jump out of the hive (not often in pubs), and moving whips aggressively! if two marines run past your pve and are shooting your harvester, move that whip back and start whacking them! the idea here isn't to kill them, but to force them to change position in a disadvantageous way, buy some time for your harvester to live, and waste their bullets / distract them from the aliens coming to kill them. also bone walls! bone walls are great. use them to split up the marines so that your aliens can engage them in bite-sized chunks. use them to slow down damage on a harvester. cyst popping is pretty good too if used correctly. also, go read the entire entry in the wiki for nutrient mist! do it now! also remember that you can use the shift key to queue up multiple commands.
this is just a quick primer on alien commanding. there's lots more stuff, but this is more than enough to get you on your way.
look how much everybody was excited for a positive thread where they can help and be proactive.
Most veteran marines Rely on their ears moreso than their eyes. If they hear One skulk sneaking past them, they'll report "a skulk going to yada yada", not "10 skulks going to "blaba"
You'll hear veteran players complain about how shade hive is "useless".
They are idiots.
I am a little bit addicted to rupture/bone wall :$
Phantom is extremely useful when first unlocked, but once a field marine tells the comm that the shade hive is up, the marines tend to stick together and have the comm scan every room. Although this will waste marine res and reduce map presence, it also means that the marine team and their commander is forced to play the game in a smarter, safer way. You don't want to force them to play better, do you?
Also, sounds bug out kinda often since 269. It's like free phantom.
It's funny you say that - one of the first things I learned in ns2 was that when they get shade, you need to scan lots. Indeed, even if they dont have phantom, scans are super useful in pub games to ensure that marines always know what they're up against (stops 5 marines turtling in a doorway because they saw 1 skulk in a room).
But I still see a good number of 'experienced' comms don't realise this or accommodate for it in their build.
The "scans cost res though!" is a poor excuse, foregoing long-term benefits of not dying+holding RTs in favour of a few res points in the short-term.
Grr comms - plz scan more, us noobs on the ground are too shit to check corners
It's countered too easily. Powerful =/= good.
Shade = good vs bad comm and bad players/bad vs good comm and good players. The only way shade first can win is if they win the res game in the first 10 minutes.
Aura and lerk is a match made in heaven.
Shade is just one of those intricacies that requires micromanagement and quick decision making by both the alien comm and alien players, shift and crag is primarily passive which makes it the least reliable choice for pubs.
Shade is powerful but its not consistent or reliable which in my opinion, makes it crap. Mech is more powerful in SC2 than 4M generally but its not reliable and requires drastically different gameplay alterations to make consistent. Unless you actively play with shade consistently and make it work, it's not going to be better than crag or shift.